Williamston: The Tar Landing on the Roanoke

Williamston, the seat of Martin County, grew up on a bend of the Roanoke River where flatboats could tie up and load. Early settlers, reportedly moving over from nearby Bertie County, were pushing into this part of the coastal plain in the first half of the seventeen hundreds, arriving in a landscape the Tuscarora people had occupied before the devastating Tuscarora War of seventeen eleven and seventeen twelve thinned their presence. Martin County was carved from Halifax and Tyrrell Counties in seventeen seventy-four, named for Josiah Martin, the last royal governor of North Carolina.

Williamston was incorporated in seventeen seventy-nine and quickly became known as Tar Landing, the primary shipping point for naval stores like tar, turpentine, and timber coming down the Roanoke from the pine forests to the west. The town was named for William Williams, a local military commander during the Revolution. Today Williamston is a quiet river town but the Roanoke still runs wide and brown alongside it.